


Silent Storybrooke: Prisonic Fairytale

by loversandantiheroes



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Silent Hill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-01-01
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loversandantiheroes/pseuds/loversandantiheroes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Silent Hill/Once Upon a Time AU</p><p>Every town has its secrets, and Storybrooke is no different.  Some secrets are just darker than others.</p><p>If you think you know how this fairytale goes, think again.</p><p>Some parts of this story may be considered violent or cruel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silent Storybrooke: Prisonic Fairytale

The inside of the pawnshop was deathly quiet. Even the clocks on the wall seemed hushed in their turnings and tickings, stilling their machinations for fear of disturbing the silence. Behind a faded green curtain lay the workroom, a mess of shelves and cabinets housing antiquities and curiosities in various stages of repair. At the center of the room was a large wooden work table littered with papers - forms and file folders, records and certificates covered all but a bare few inches of the wood. Newspaper clippings formed a haphazard stack at the center of the mess. Grainy photographs printed in smudged ink populated each of the clippings, faces of people frozen in dot matrix. Here was a man with neat hair and an uneasy smile. Here a fair-haired boy and girl - twins, it said - with their arms linked, squinting up at the camera against a late summer sun. A fat man with a pinched, sour face. A grey-haired woman in a black cloche hat. More. So many more.

A man sat behind the table, slumped in the chair with a black lacquered cane across his knees, his breath ragged, but slowing. Gingerly, with a shaking hand, he plucked one clipping from the pile. He paid no mind to the headline, he had read everything ten times or more. Every word was burned into his brain.

What caught him and held him were the photos. At the top was a man in a jumpsuit and handcuffs being escorted from the back of a police van by two officers. Lank hair covered much of his face, yet there was a disturbing sense that under all that he was grinning. Below, and this one held him the longest, was a picture of a small boy in a striped shirt. Dark eyes, dark hair that hung below his ears. The boy was smiling, too, but it was a forced smile, strained and fearful.

Gingerly the man brushed a fingertip across the picture. When the scruffy fellow - Jefferson he’d called himself, some photographer - had first appeared in the shop with his story, he had refused to believe him. Drugs were a common enough problem in the area, but there was a very good clinic on the other side of the valley if the man wished to be seen. Then Jefferson had produced the clippings, reams of newspaper articles covering nearly fifteen years.

He had told Jefferson to get out then. The man had made a hesitant apology before scurrying out of the shop. For an hour all he’d been able to do was stare at the clippings, trying to process the information, feeling it stick in his craw and refuse solidly to go down. He couldn’t believe it, he  _wouldn’t_  believe it.

But then he had found the picture. He spent the next week calling in favors to get the files and records strewn around him now. Everyone left a paper trail, no matter how deep they tried to bury it. And finally he found it, and the picture had come into full focus. Here was the truth, the bald, naked, bloody truth, and finally he could see the trap he had walked so willingly into.

The altar upstairs lay in ruins, the first casualty of his rage. Broken glass strewn across the floor and peppered the wallpaper where bottles had struck the wall and exploded. _You promised_ , he had roared at the walls, hurling candles and statuary, nearly setting the curtains alight and breaking two panes out of the upstairs window.   _You promised! YOU PROMISED!_ Stumbling blindly, barely registering the pain in his bad leg, he had seized the altar table and, in a frightening show of strength, flung it across the room. The top cracked almost in half.

He had fallen to his knees then, dimly aware of the slivers of glass that pricked his skin through his trouser legs, and wept.

He was calm enough now. Rage had turned to a cold, quiet determination. The plan had taken shape in his mind almost instantly, spurred by the information his would-be masters had tried so fruitlessly to keep from him.

From beneath the work table he pulled out an old black leather medical bag, the kind toted by kindly neighborhood physicians in the days when it was still fashionable for a doctor to make house calls to the sick and the dying instead of forcing them to line up in a grotesque display in hospital waiting rooms. The mouth of the bag opened with a satisfying creak and a vague smell of camphor. Small glass vials lined the bottom, some empty, others full of herbs and powders and tinctures. Strapped to the sides were a few tallow candles, rolls of parchment, a small assortment of antique scissors, knives, and clamps.

There were two vials of a pale, milky tincture in the bottom of the bag. He slipped one into his coat pocket, and after a moment’s thought a second, smaller vial of white powder followed it. Just in case.

The night air was chilly and damp and heavy with the sharp salt tang of the ocean as he limped his way toward his car, his coat collar turned up against the breeze. A faint mist swirled around him as he walked. He hadn’t bothered to lock the door of the shop. Let them enter if they wanted. Let them see. Had they heard him screaming? Were the rats even now scurrying off to their mistress to deliver news of his defection? Right now he didn’t care. Right now all that mattered was that he had enough time to do what he meant to do. What he  _had_  to do.

 _You promised_ , he thought again. It was a litany. Every echoing footfall in the monochrome night: _you promised_.

And the price for her promise had been his own in return, swearing himself into her service, into their service. His stomach twisted to think of it. The deals he had made, the payments he had collected, tithes on behalf of the ones he had so willingly tied himself to for one favor.

"You promised," he whispered, and clutched at his wrist as if pained.

Was that laughter he heard in the darkness, or the wind?

It was late enough that the roads were nearly deserted, traffic lights no longer cycling but flashing yellow. It took bare minutes for him to pull into the parking lot of Storybrooke General Hospital. ICU was on the fifth floor. He rode the elevator up. The vial in his pocket was a reassuring cold against his palm that seemed to radiate up his arm and engulf his whole body. The rushing of his own blood filled his ears like the roar of a freight train, and yet he was calm. Cold and calm.

The ward was quiet, curtains open on all but one of the glass-walled rooms, dark dollhouse views of silent machinery and stripped, empty beds. The curtains on the fourth room were drawn, the overheads making them glow milky white. A single uniformed cop sat on a plastic chair outside the sliding door, a styrofoam cup of coffee between his feet, flicking idly through an old copy of Playboy with black gloved hands. Sharp blue eyes watched his approach over the top of the magazine.

When he made towards the door, the cop stood and held up his hands, palms out, fingers splayed. “Sorry pal, I’m afraid visiting hours are over, you can’t go in there.”

He smiled thinly and pulled the sleeve up over his right wrist. Beneath was a wide black leather cuff. Embossed in red was a sigil, three circles inside a larger runic circle, crowned with a singular staring eye.

The cop - Gucci, according to the nameplate - glanced down at it and pulled his hands back as if burned. “My apologies, sir. You, uh, you go right on ahead,” he said, sidling back towards his chair. As Gucci picked up his magazine again, the man pulled the smaller vial from his pocket, thumbed the cork, and blew a pinch of the white powder at the man’s face.

"Hey man, what the hell?"  Gucci sneezed, patting his pockets for a tissue. He stopped suddenly, as if a thought had occurred to him, and sat swaying gently in the chair. Then, softly, he began to giggle.

The door slid back with a hiss, curtains following in a rattle of casters, and a shudder passed through him as he stepped inside. There was magic here, the air was thick with it. The room smelled sharply of antiseptics and an underlying note of blood, but running over all that was the acrid hit of ozone - pure, raw magic. It was enough to make the hairs at the back of his neck stand on end.

For a moment, as his eyes rested on the small figure in the hospital bed, he thought he might weep. It looked like something from a 30s horror film, a small form swaddled in bandages, a mummified boy-king. A tall nurse in a red cardigan bent over the child with studious precision, carefully unrolling the last of his new bandages. A plastic tray held the remainder of the old bandages, stained in shades of yellow and maroon. The boy’s frail chest rose and fell in time with the ventilator.

How long now had he been down here, preserved by magic and ceaselessly pumping machines? Months? A year? Two years? One little boy alone but for the passing of nurses and the white noise of the television and the machines that pumped food and air and drugs and life and pumped and pumped and  _pumped._

The grainy photograph surfaced in his mind. One little boy.

_You promised._

He crossed tentatively to the comatose child, half expecting the wards around the room to stop him or strike him dead. The nurse gave a startled yelp - she had been so absorbed in her work she hadn’t noted his arrival, and clasped a hand to her chest.

"Jesus Christ, Mr. Gold, you scared me to death!"

He smiled at her, the reaction automatic, reflexive, as swift and easy as a master quick-change artist trading one mask for another. “Beg your pardon Miss Lucas, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

He glanced down at the boy in the bed. “How is he?”

The nurse shook her head, her smile gone. “His vitals are holding, but there’s no change in brain function.” She began nervously packing the soiled bandages into the biohazard disposal. “And the burns still aren’t healing,” she said, tossing her blue exam gloves in after. “I’ve never seen anything like it. No one has. I’m amazed he’s still alive.”

"How long has it been?" Gold whispered, his bravado slipping. "How long since the fire?"

Ruby touched the bandages over the boy’s face carefully, a caring but hesitant gesture. “A year,” she said. “A year to the day, I think.”

Gold nodded. “Yes. Of course.” He should’ve known.

She sighed, clasping her hands in front of her like a schoolgirl. “Mr. Gold, was there something you…they…I mean, is something wrong?” she asked haltingly, eyes searching his face for some clue towards the purpose for his sudden appearance.

Gold smiled broadly, flashing gilt teeth. Back to business. “Actually,” he said, pulling the vial of powder from his coat pocket again, “I was asked by Dr. Whale to give you this. An early Christmas bonus for all your hard work.”

The girl’s eyes flew wide, shocked and more than a little eager. “That’s…very generous of him,” she said.

He pressed the bottle of PTV into her palm and rolled her fingers tight around it. “You have a Merry Christmas, Miss Lucas,” he said with a wink.

For a moment he was certain she was either going to kiss him or slap him across the face, but at last she gave a coquettish grin, muttered “Merry Christmas,” and hurried out the door.

It took him less than thirty seconds to find a fresh syringe. He hooked his cane over the end of the bed and limped to the boy’s bedside, fishing the vial out of his pocket and carefully uncorking it. There wasn’t a broad difference between the substance he’d given the cop and the nurse and what was in the vial he held now. Both were derived from the seeds of a local plant, a flowering herb commonly known as White Claudia. The powdered form was a popular street drug, PTV, something akin to an opiate/psychedelic highball, and very addictive. Memory loss was a common side effect, something Gold was hoping would work to his advantage with the officer outside.

The nurse he worried much less about. Her dependency was so ill-kept a secret that she had even come to him on occasion, offering pretty favors for far less of the drug than he’d just provided.

Gold pulled as much into the syringe as he dared. Too much could be fatal. Too little and it might not have any effect at all. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. He fitted the tip of the syringe to one of the injection ports of the IV and pressed the plunger. Behind him the EEG monitor scratched constant, barely trembling lines onto the paper. Gold’s throat tightened. “I am so very sorry for everything.”

Gold bent carefully over the boy, guilt and fear and grief hitting him like a freight train as he looked down at his wasted frame. _I did this_ , he thought helplessly, sick with notion, but unable to let it go.  _I did not strike the match but I as good as offered him up to the flame._

"Henry," he whispered into the boy’s ruined ear. "You must listen to me very very carefully.  We don’t have much time."

As Gold spoke, the thin, barely quivering lines on the EEG read out trembled. By the time he had finished speaking they had given way to broad, sweeping arcs. And by the time he stepped into the elevator they had settled into a series of small peaks and valleys.

Henry was dreaming.


End file.
